Journal of Greek Media & Culture - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2015

A publicity campaign run in Athens by the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation in October 2013 in order to advertise its acquisition of the Cavafy Archive, until then lying in relevant obscurity, turned into a media disaster when critics and members of the public protested against what they argued was a misquoting of the highly revered Alexandrian. In this article, I am looking at this rather entertaining story of misunderstood intentions in order to suggest that even though Cavafy himself may be shown to have enjoyed history as fragmented experience, and despite the fact that the modern archive is one of often-conflicting partialities rather than one of completeness, we, as consumers of Cavafy’s oeuvre, tend to sustain his long-established position as a paragon of Greek culture, canonized through his own nonconformity. As a typical case of ‘archive fever’, the events described here confirm the political specificity of any literary discourse, even when conducted out of context (or especially so).

Ever since it first appeared in the Catalan and Castilian sections of the Spanish literary field, the poetry of C. P. Cavafy has been significantly bound up with the visual arts. The very first Spanish edition (Barcelona, 1962) of his poetry in book form, translated brilliantly into Catalan by Carles Riba, included a number of illustrations, by the recently deceased artist Josep Maria Subirachs, which attracted considerable critical attention. Even though it undoubtedly belongs to the tradition fostered by these editions, the work of artist Rogelio López Cuenca entitled Calle Cavafis (1998) represents a rather different poetics and a different political discourse. Fifteen years before the outbreak of the controversy regarding the use of Cavafy’s image and verses on Athenian means of public transport, passengers on urban buses in Malaga (Spain) saw a series of gigantic posters stuck on bus stop shelters every day for two weeks during the autumn of 1998. Combining letters, colours and illustrations, these posters reproduced poems or fragments of poems by Cavafy in Catalan or Castilian and, occasionally, even in the original Greek. Also, during the same period of time, thousands of postcards which also reproduced Cavafy’s verses were distributed and displayed in different bars and pubs all over Malaga city centre. A total number of sixteen poems found their way to these posters and postcards visually and aesthetically – and we might even say politically – (re)elaborated by Rogelio López Cuenca. Starting from this selection of poems and translations, the article proposed here aims to place Rogelio López Cuenca’s artistic intervention in the reception (different readings and uses) of Cavafy’s poetry in Spain and Latin America, and at the same time to inquire into the aesthetic and political presuppositions that inform it.

Two portraits commissioned by C. P. Cavafy a few years before his death have become the dominant images of the poet’s posthumous legacy. An Asian tapestry framing the poet’s head is critical in understanding Cavafy’s self-representation and artistic sensibilities. The tapestry connects Cavafy with the British Aesthetic movement of the 1870s that he witnessed through the social circle of painter James McNeill Whistler and his Greek patrons. The article also argues that the erotic sensibilities of the tapestry were intentionally suppressed in the dissemination of the artist’s image by Greek modernism of the 1930s. The photographic background affirms the complex associations between domestic space, photography and closeted iconographies in the life of a poet who did not leave behind a rich body of writing on the visual arts. Foregrounding this photographic background opens up a new dimension to the artistic universe of Cavafy and his impact in the visual history of portraiture.

This article offers a critical discussion of photographic projects based on Cavafy’s poetry. It begins with an overview of the theoretical implications of photographing poetry within the wider framework of photography and literature as fields interconnected in their narrative concerns. To establish the link between photographic and other visual adaptations, the article goes on to discuss Cavafy in painting; this dicussion proves that gay agendas that framed the project of such photographers as Duane Michals or Dimitris Yeros, had already appeared in the work of painters, notably David Hockney. In its second part, the article examines in detail the most important photographic adaptations of Cavafy’s work from 1978 to the present day, placing them in two large categories: the ‘gay’ adaptations, which focus on issues of body, sexuality and LGB rights, and those (more recent ones) that identify Cavafy with modernity, aestheticism and memory. The proliferation of photographic projects based on Cavafy points to his transformation from literary figure to a creative field inviting artists to self-expression.

This article provides a detailed reading of Trojans, the medium-length feature film by Constantine Giannaris on the life and work of C. P. Cavafy, released in 1990. Unlike the conventional life trajectory proposed by the more popular biopic Kavafis (Yannis Smaragdis, 1996), Giannaris’s film presents the telling of a life of C. P. Cavafy as a radical identity quest. It is a cinematic work as much about the past as it is about the present, as much about the poet’s legacy as it is about the director’s precarity and autobiographical exposure. As a representative example of the cultural politics of New Queer Cinema, Trojans is influenced by the film aesthetics of Derek Jarman and opens a dialogue with Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989). Even though it follows the frame of a literary biopic up to a point, the film ends up being a meditation on cultural expression, identification and representation. It undermines traditional narratives of Cavafy’s life, using cinematic form in order to reflect on the elements of an archival, genealogical and affective reading of Cavafy’s life and work. In so doing, it proposes that the pensive spectator and the possessive reader are necessary positions for developing oppositional aesthetics and non-normative identity as public political gestures.

Due to his prominence and recognizability, Cavafy’s reception has expanded in recent years to include diverse types of media. This article focuses on the intermedial transformations/translations of Cavafy’s work into comics, animations and film. It begins with a theoretical overview of current terms, such as intermedial transformation and adaptation, and goes on to examine general aspects of the transition from one medium to another. It subsequently analyses the ways in which the specific characteristics and devices of the source medium are transformed in the target medium. Special attention is directed on Cavafy’s prose piece ‘Eis to fos tis imeras’/’In Broad Daylight’ (1895–96), as well as the poems ‘Ithaki’/’Ithaca’ (1911) and ‘Teichi’/’The Walls’ (1897). The article questions traditional views that distinguish between commercial visual transformations/translations and artistic ones or between ‘faithful’ and ‘unfaithful’ adaptations, pointing out that the most accomplished intermedial translations of Cavafy are often those which stray from the original context of Cavafy’s poetry.

This article approaches the social and cultural aspects of engaging with and communicating C. P. Cavafy and his oeuvre in Web 2.0 platforms from an interdisciplinary point of view. By discussing the social web as a new discourse network, the article initially describes how the data architecture of the Web 2.0 ecology reconfigures communicative procedures, relations and roles towards a platformed sociality. It subsequently focuses on ways in which the transformation of the reader/user into a content-producer may enrich the engagement with the Cavafian oeuvre. The notion of digi-formance is also proposed to describe the tropes that the usergenerated content is communicated through Web 2.0 environments, inaugurating a participatory culture and practice based on notions of consumer production, remix and sharing. The article ends by further suggesting how the social web and digital networking technologies could remodel literary sociality, in which the Cavafian oeuvre and scholarship are submerged, within the digital era.

K.P. KAVAFIS, TA THEATRIKA POIIMATA/THE THEATRICAL POEMS, Maria Athanasopoulou (2014) Athens: Kritiki, 154 pp, ISBN: 9789602189214, Paperback, €10.00

Greece and Britain since 1945, David Wills (ed.) (2014) Second Edition, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 213 pp, ISBN: 9781443855341, Paperback, £29.99

The Ghost Behind the Arras: Transformat ions of the ‘POLITICAL Verse’ in Twentieth-century Greek Poetry, Vassilios Letsios (2013) Saarbrücken: Scholar’s Press, 399 pp, ISBN: 3639511441, Paperback, £97.00

Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond, Vassiliki Rapti (2013) Burlington: Ashgate Studies in Surrealism, xiv + 193 pp, ISBN: 9781409429067, Hardback, $99.95

Greek film festivals as a diasporic institution in the United States of America: A comparative account

‘Greece in Crisis: Culture and The Politics of Austerity’ (University of Birmingham, 23 May 2015)